i didn't want to like this....

Perplexity Computer makes me feel like I've been wasting my time for months. I'm going a little crazy. I didn't want to like it. But here's the thing. I built some very cool and overly engineered AI systems. I've got my personal AI infrastructure inside Claw Code. 103 skills, multiple models, Gemini codecs, image generation. I'm using Open Claw with over seven agents. My setup is pretty sick. I like it. And then Perplexity drops Perplexity Computer. 200 bucks a month. 19 AI models. Runs in the cloud while you sleep. That's the pitch. And it kind of does all this frustratingly well. Like I didn't have to build a single tool to make this work, which I don't like. Now, I know that sounds very hypy, hypeish. I'm not sure how you say it. We're going to put that aside here. Separate reality from hype. But seriously, I tell it something to do something. I make a wish. And it's not even a good prompt. And it just makes things like this gaming website for my kids or this really intense research on a cult I found here in Japan while eating at their deli. And I'm just riding the metro trying to keep my kids from screaming and typing in halfbaked prompts. I didn't see this coming, but it taught me something about myself and it had me rethinking my approach to how I build AI systems. I spend way too much time building these systems. I stay up late, the first thing I think about in the morning is, "Ooh, I can just do this one thing or I have to add this new thing that just came out and that happens every 5 minutes." I love building all these tools. It's fun to play with. And that's the thing. I'm just playing. I'm not actually using the tools for what I want them to do. I'm just sharpening my axe. That's what people say, right? I spent all of my idea energy on creating those tools, sharpening my axe. Whereas with Perplexity Computer, there was no axe to sharpen. It just was already there. And frankly, I don't need more tools. I realized that I need a box. And you know, Perplexity Computer became my box for a moment. And it did well. So, let's look inside that box. Like, what is this thing? Why is Chuck so jazzed about it? I'm not so jazzed about it. Shut up. But it is pretty cool. We'll talk about it. So, get your coffee ready. Actually, my coffee is almost empty. These things are so tiny. You want to come with me to get some coffee in Japan? Let's go. This is how I get coffee here in Japan. Okay. Okay. So, what the junk is Perplexity Computer? Coffee break. Honestly, when I first saw it, I was a bit confused. I'm already a Plexity user, right? So, I come to Perplexity and I see this a little chat box like every other AI. And then to access computer, you click on this and watch what happens. You ready? Almost nothing. Like, how is this a different product? And then I realized something. This is cloud code without the terminal. It's open cloud without getting hacked. It's all of that, but you don't need a degree in DevOps to deploy it. It's just already set up. It's already there. So, I'm looking at this. I'm like, where where's the stuff that I need to set up? Where are the tools? No. No. This is already done. All you have to do is just type in what you want to happen. Tell it what you want. Make a wish. Now, I used to work for Blockbuster. Yes, I'm old. And one thing I miss was the POSOS, the point of sale system that we used to rent videos out to people. It was Command line. My first experience with Command Line. Actually, I want to see if Perplexia Computer can rebuild that system so everyone can have the experience of working at Blockbuster. Don't you want that? Fun fact, I went to the last Blockbuster in Oregon. They still use that same system. It runs off floppy drives. It's crazy. Now, I have no idea if it can do this. We're seeing this live together. I've made my wish. Let's submit it. And there it goes. Now, let's talk about what's happening here. And as we go through this, I'm going to show you four things that I think make perplexity computer kind of killer, unique, maybe a little bit awesome. And we're going to get a bit nerdy because how it works is kind of cool. Like for example, right now our prompt went to the meta router, which will decide which model will become the orchestrator or the conductor, a high-inking model. It will normally choose Opus 4.6. It's this orchestrator model that will then decompose our prompt, which sounds gross, but it's not. It's just trying to figure out what I want. What is Chuck's intent? Is this going to be a single task? Is it a recurring schedule task? Which we can do that. How big is this project? Let's figure it out. And sometimes they'll even ask you clarifying questions if you're not clear. I was clear. My prompt was awesome. Now, right away, we can see that it's loading up some skills. Website building, research assistant, and yes, Perplexity Computer does have skills. It has built-in ones or you can bring your own. It's creating a research plan. Actually, this is the entire plan. Now, you'll notice that Perplexity Computer will use whatever model it can to do the best job. It's model agnostic. Again, 19 Frontier models and it will choose whatever one is best for the job it's trying to accomplish. Big think stuff, Opus 4.6. Research, Gemini 3.1 Pro. Images, Gemini Nano Banana Pro. Oh, okay. Look what's happening here. Right here, it launched its own computer. And this is what puts the computer in Perplexity Computer. Each subtask will get its own isolated compute environment. They're called Firecracker MicroBMS. Such a fun name. Two virtual CPUs, 8 gigs of RAM, and they boot in under 125 milliseconds. You can actually see what it's doing. It's hitting some Roblox on trying to access Reddit. Whoa, partner. But it figured it out. It found some game Blockbuster 3D, which I did not know was a thing. That's pretty cool. And notice this computer is just like its own computer. That sub agent, it wrote a document. Another agent can then read that document. They have a shared file workspace. It found the Blockbuster CSR handbook. Oh my gosh. And notice the model it's using. This is all big thing stuff, man. You had to be smart to work at Blockbuster. And now all the research is done. It can finally start building. It launches another Firecracker VM. Sorry, that was lame. And it does this for a while, about 14 minutes. Now, this is the other killer thing. I'm not even sure what number we're on now. I think we're on number four now. This is the other killer thing about Perplexity Computer is that you can just walk away. You can close your computer, turn off your iPad, whatever. It's happening in the cloud. And then you can just pick up your phone and check on the task. The interface is pretty much the same. Computer is now built into the Perplexity app. And I'm telling you, I've been using this on the trains and stuff and it's pretty fun because it looks just like this. And now it's finished. Now it'll deliver to you kind of a way to access this in your terminal. It's like just a website right here. Like watch. I could download the HTML or I just click on this and launch it. And this is a website I can just share with people and use. I think this is fully functional. Let's check it out. It looks good. I kind of forgot what the Blockbuster POS system look like. I don't know if this is accurate. If you used to work for Blockbuster, please tell me if this looks good. Okay. It's booting. Dude, this is so cool. Now, we're going to try something here. I want to tell it every hour, I want you to improve one thing about this game or the simulation, rather. Make it better, make it more realistic. I can tell it that and it will just do it. I've done that on a number of the things I've built and it's so cool. It works so well. That's one I I think that's number five maybe of the things I like is you can do cron or scheduled jobs. And that's my favorite example. Just making something better every hour is insane on my wallet, but it's still pretty fun. Now, it's not just about improving an app. You could also do, hey, check my email every 5 minutes or check the news every day and alert me if something crazy is going on. Send me a Slack message when you're done. Now, again, all this I can do with the stuff I've built. I use multiple models. I can do scheduled things. I can do research. I'm going to have my apps visualize and check things, but goodness, this just did it. No tooling required, no messing around, no tweaking. It just made it happen. And that was one prompt. One prompt to a working app. And again, I gave it to my wife and kids just to see what they could build. My middle daughter Millie went crazy with that. Couldn't get her off. Again, I'll show you what they built at the end of the video. But let me show you what else I built with this. And it's kind of crazy. So, Perplexity built a gaming website for my kids. I hate it when my kids play these dumb gaming websites. They play the weirdest games. There's this one game where it's just a big ball of poop and it's a little bit funny. But still, I don't know what they're doing. So, I need to have a little bit of control on that. So, I'm like, you know what? You can only play games that I make or you make. That's the new rule. That's the new game. Now, this isn't my first time trying to build a gaming website for my kids. I've tried this twice now and it was very, very hard. The first time I failed. Second time I kind of did it, but it was janky and it took me weeks. Let me show it to you. It's so cool. And if you've never done this for your kids or your family, you should do this yourself right now. Here is my prompt. I gave it a few ideas for games and stuff. It did have a few questions on how we want to make it work. And then it just went to town building it. And here's what it gave me. Again, I had no prompts beyond the initial prompt. Let's play it. Here's my games. It's got sound effects. Let's play Plug Dash. Look at this. Isn't that amazing? Let's try one more. Neon racer dude. Not bad, right? But I didn't want to stop there, right? So, I asked it to add some login. So, I want to be able to admin this, add login for my kids. I want a leaderboard, high scores. And then I did the whole thing where I'm like, why don't you improve this every hour? Then I bumped it up to 4 hours because my credit card was melting. But here's the end result. It's so cool. Oh, and I also had it published to a VPS. I just gave it my VPS login and it took care of it for me. And look at this. It added some more games for me. It created Exit 8. I told to do this actually. We're in Japan. We love the game Exit 8. I wanted to create an 8-bit version of it. Look at that. How cool is that? Isn't that amazing? If you want to play, I'll have links in the description. But it just kind of did that. And let me tell you, I it took me an embarrassing amount of time to do this before. Again, the first attempt failed. Second attempt took me weeks with Gemini, and then I moved to Codeex, and then I moved back to Claude and it looked okay. But it took me a long time. A lot of tweaking my tools and getting it just right. Whereas Perplexia Computer just was kind of here already, and it just did it. That's cool. And it wasn't just this. I started building other stuff, too. I built Kambini Quest. I built a viral content radar. I built a new gamified way to consume news. These kind of ideas just started pouring out of me with this tool, but not other tools. And I kind of had to sit down and think about it for a second. I'm like, is Perplexity Computer really this amazing that oh my gosh, is it all is the hype real? Yes and no. What Plexity Computer did isn't that it's the only tool that can do this? It's that it like again put me in a box. And I had to sit this for a moment to really think about it. Why didn't I have all these ideas just kind of bubbling out of me with my other tools? And I kind of alluded to this before. It's because I spent all of my idea energy on creating those tools, sharpening my axe. Whereas with Perplexity Computer, there was no axe to sharpen. It just was already there, sharp, a whole set of tools. All that was left for me was to just be the idea person to tell it what to do. So my ideas just kind of started flowing. So I don't know what to do with that. How do I stop tweaking my tools cuz I can't stop. I have a problem. Now, I mentioned a cult earlier. I legit found a cult in Japan by accident. And this thing, Perplexity Computer, helped me figure out everything about it. And I think this is what separates Perplexia Computer from any other tooling that does similar things. So, here's the story. We're in Kyoto, Japan. We're on the street. We walk past this deli called the Yellow Deli. Great food, locations all over the world. And I got curious about how it started because there's only one location in Japan, a bunch in the US. Why Japan? It seems really random. I did a simple search in perplexity. And dude, it's a cult. And I kept pushing for more information. I want to learn about the Kyoto location. Like, what is this? Who runs this? How does it work? And it couldn't tell me much. So, sitting there in that deli, I'm like, hm, I wonder if Perplexity Computer can do a better job than just the basic Plexity search. I'm just curious. Let's see what we got. So, I just pulled it up on my phone, and here is my prompt. And I wanted a dashboard corkboard style investigation inspired. I wanted to feel cool. Dude, it did it. You want to see it? I'm not sure I'm going to publish this because I'm still here. I don't want anything to happen to me. It's called the Yellow Deli Files. And this is a pretty sick website. And it's funny things about the Kyoto branch that I just couldn't figure out with perplexity like where their commune is, how it got here from Australia, the people who started it. It is so crazy how well it did. The cost, let me see how much it cost me. 1,700 credits took about 27 minutes. That's crazy though. Like I just gave it to this smart thing to research for me and it gave me this amazing result. Okay, time to get a bit more critical of this because I I know I've been like, "Oh, look at this. Oh, look at that." And it's genuinely cool. But let's get critical. Let's get real. This thing's expensive. And before I show you all the things I built, including my kids, let me show you how much it cost me. And full disclosure, Perplexity did give me a ton of credits to play with. Let me show you my usage. The plan credits come with 10,000. That's the $200 a month plan, which by the way, you're going to burn through that real quick if you're having fun like me. They gave me 35,000 bonus credits to play with and then I couldn't stop myself and I paid for additional 37,500 credits. So roughly 82,500 credits. Editors put up the math on that how much all this stuff cost me. Like that's a lot. And I think where Perplexi Computer I don't know how they're going to do this and figure it out. You know, they're paying API prices for the models that we're using. They're paying Opus 4.6 prices and Gemini and then they're passing those costs along to us. So, Perplexity is operating as a middleman. They're doing some amazing stuff. The harness and the orchestration's really incredible, but they are a middleman. If you're new to this world, when you pay API prices, it's pay as you go and it's higher. If you pay for the plan, you get a way better deal. I'll have a cost breakdown in the description below. And these providers, they want you to come and use their stuff. They want to lock you into their ecosystem, which is why Perplexity Computer is so awesome. They are model agnostic, but they're paying API prices. cuz I'm sure they get a better deal at the enterprise level because they're paying for so much. But the pricing, I'm not sure if they'll ever be able to compete with that. I hope they do because this genuinely is an amazing product. But that's the one thing that keeps me from using this all the time because look at what else they build. Look at this. I'm going to breeze through a few of these cuz I don't want to bore you too much. But Kambini Quest, I'm in Japan. I want to know how to talk to people at Kambinis, 7-Elevens, Lawson's, things like that. This thing has a million features now. This is one of the ones I let auto run and just develop features. So, that's cool. I'll publish this one. It's pretty fun. I did a gamified IT news website, which was okay. It's supposed to make every news thing worth uh learning about into a game that you uh work through. It's actually kind of cool. Oh, and you battle stuff. And I made an IT job market pulse dashboard. This is actually a pretty sick website. I might publish this one. Let me show you what my kids built. All right. Show me what you got. So, it's this rice cooking game. Rice cooking game. Okay. So, what did you say in the prompt? So, I created a new game where this character cooks rice dishes and the player gets to eat the food after it's prepared. Different things. You were working on it for a long time. It's called Kitchen. Kay Kitchen. Dude, it's like Roblox. It looks so good. Wait, let me see. Again, most of what I built here, I'm going to try and have published and accessible for you to play with right now. But again, the thing I I was most surprised about with Perplexi to Computer wasn't that it's like this super amazing software, which it really is cool. It's that it revealed to me my problem. It's that I need to stop playing with the AI tools and start using them. And I'm not really sure how to start doing that yet because I'm obsessed with making my AI tools better. And apps like Perplexia Computer help me to stay focused on the ideas. But I'm probably not going to use something like that. It's not for me. But for my wife or my kids or anyone who's not going to be obsessed with the tooling, who's not who doesn't have an IT and tinker background. Um, they'll love it. I'm excited to see where they go with it. I just really really hope they get the price down. I hope they figure that out. I'm rooting for them cuz I do love Perplexity. Anyways, that's all I got, guys. I'll catch you guys next time. Hey, I made it to the end of the video. If you're new here, I like to pray for you, my audience. I know it's weird, some YouTube guy, bearded dude praying for you. It's okay. I know it's weird. Let's do it. Cuz I do believe in the power of prayer and how it can change your life. And I genuinely care about you. So, let's pray. Uh God, I thank you for the person on the other side of the screen, this phone, this camera. Uh I thank you that they are passionate about tech, about technology, and I pray for their lives. I pray that you remove any anxiety with AI, that you would give them a path forward with their jobs, with what they're doing in their lives. Bless their families. If there's anything going on with their family right now that's um if there's tension, if there's any kind of conflict that's not being resolved, Lord, I pray that you just bring a resolution there. Let them not go to bed angry. Bless them in that right right now, God. And I just ask in your name that you bless my audience as a whole. Just help us to trudge forward with tenacity, with ferocity in this crazy AI world. And let us come out on top. Let us value people and be excited and relent relentlessly optimistic. Jesus, we thank you. We love you for everything. It's in your name we pray. Amen. All right, guys. Yeah. Don't forget to be relentlessly optimistic. my new phrase of the year. I'll catch you guys next time.